Not sure, actually. It might well be Celtic, all that stuff with horse sacrifices, horse burials etc. Offhand I can't remember if the Celts were in favour of or against eating it. I'd have to do more research to refresh things than I currently have time for (and than this thread would allow for). If the Celts (and possibly other pre-Christian populations like the Germanics and the Slavs) ate it ritually, then the prohibition-turned-taboo would indeed have been Catholic (IX-XIIth centuries) and particularly enforced in those "frontier" lands that centuries later, for completely unrelated economic reasons, were to turn Protestant. I wonder if there is a parallel with the Anglo-Saxon taboo on "toadstools" (some of which which were undoubtedly consumed in ritual contexts).

Last night, Beppe Grillo, the front figure of the Five-Star Movement that made a killer in the elections that were just held in Italy, has stubbornly remained locked in his house, trying to get a well-deserved rest while hords of journalists were feeling despicated outside his gate. To him, and to me, the vast majority of tv, radio and print are walking deads, slaves to a moribund system.

and tell me its' not a commercial ad? OK, it's been "tagged" at such, but that's two and a half years ago and nothing has been done about it. Yet, someone could just have translated the Danish version, which is not a commercial ad.

This said, years of experience with Wikipedia, including a brief spree as an editor, have taught me that the English and the Spanish localizations are rather untrustworthy, and the French one even more so. To some degree this is also the case of Swedish Wikipedia, whereas the German and the Italian ones are quite reliable. Other localizations I'm familiar with, like those in Portuguese or, worse still, in Danish, are almost irrelevant.

The last few years, Switzerland has been trying hard to be the good girl in the gang: economy, financial activities, policing and of course military cooperation, to name the essential ones, are all domains in which integration with EU-US aka. NATO has been on the agenda. A month ago or so, this has even stretched to Switzerland obeying Israel's injunction to stop visitors to Palestina from flying. So we shouldn't be all too surprised if this pattern now extends to so-called security.

If the growing political/free speech censorship we are witnessing on the European internet – under all kinds of pretexts: copyright infringement or the specious interpretation of diffamation laws – now extends to Switzerland, it might be interesting to watch what will happen with those activists and bloggers (Beppe Grillo is one name that stands out) who either are hosted or have declared their intention to be hosted on Swiss servers.

Very, very unfortunate, because in more aspects than one (use of disreputable chemicals in their cosmetics, for example), L'Oréal is one of the corporations with the worse record in Europe, going back to their collaboration with the Nazis and other distasteful characters:

Liliane Bettencourt, who recently has made the headlines in the affair bearing her name, is the heiress of L'Oréal, as well as the richest woman in France. Maybe the European Court, as other European institutions that are fast turning themselves into tools of the Atlantist agenda, will soon be as independent as the Criminal Court in The Hague (i.e. – zilch).

I have reason to suspect, and the Western media's targeted hype will not lead me to believe anything different, that the episode hardly distinguishes itself from the incubator babies murdered in Kuwait, Amina Abdallah aka. Tom MacMaster, the preposterous stories currently propagated about Libya and Syria, or even those statements by Iran's president that (according to those who understand farsi) were falsely translated by Reuters but have never stopped circulating ever since. To name just a few.

But, if I may repeat myself, I don't think this is the proper venue to discuss the Neda episode.

FYI. The UK is often seen as the US's poodle (and we may discuss how many poodles the US has – or what kind of kennel the US actually IS). Well, take the image one step further, and look at Denmark as being the parasite worm in the poodle's guts.

And: Denmark's citizens allow this to happen to them, not so much out of of fear than because the vast majority of them don't give a fuck, just as they can't be bothered when their elected representatives, ranging from extreme right to extreme left, overwhelmingly support enacting an anti-emigrant (read: anti-Muslim) agenda. In many respects, today's Denmark embodies a model of the future "they" want for the rest of the world.

Last time I checked on related figures, 24% of all duties levied on music played in public in Italy went to the artists. That's right, twenty-four percent. Guess where the rest went.

A long time ago, a close acquaintance of mine had his composition works played for a whole hour on Belgium's National Radio network, who automatically deposit any relevant duties to SABAM, the entity in that country that allegedly manages artists' rights. Years later, passing through Belgium again and a bit broke, he tried to get paid, but was told that unclaimed duties and related archives were deleted after 10 years. Compare that to the current 70 years or the 100 years such entities would love to keep on claiming copyright for.

The French Socialist Party, like most of Europe's old social-democrats and communist parties of yore, are wimps in decomposition, offering no real alternatives to the existing political order. As such, they are nothing but make-believe plasters on the democratic facade. In my view, Royal's declaration of intent about Hadopi must be understood in the context of the coming Socialist Party primaries and presidental elections, baiting a substantial segment of France's disgruntled youth.

Who cares about 16 minutes? ObL died in Dec. 2001, and his funeral was even reported at the time by Fox, of all propaganda outlets. That is the real problem about the NYT and others of the same ilk, not whether they act as sock puppets of the circles of power in a more or less efficient manner.